Re mental health - not all people with poor mental health are evil (I speak as one who has been an inpatient. And there's a lot of prejudice about mhp. Nobody in my rl knows any of that about me. Apart from my family who lived through it!) but do people think that all those who do evil things do so because of a mental health issue? Do people think that someone can be evil and not have an imbalance of the mind?

Because I think that's where people struggle and why so many people think evil = mhp / mhp = evil. Because they cannot believe, don't want to believe, daren't believe that a 'sane' person could do things which are evil.

But Amber you cannt disguise the cold hard facts. The manner in which they killed those people. How they lacked any emotion or connection to their victims. Ian Brady is one of them. I am sure he knows full well where tat boy is burried, but refuses to tell anyone. the mum died not knowing where on Saddleworth Moore her son is buried. What sort of individual could keep something like that from a mother. Ahh affectionless psychopath comes to mind

I've nearly started this thread a few times after seeing someone referred to as evil...

The idea that anyone is "just" evil just sounds way too religious to me - a way of explaining something that noone has any idea about, but that actually we now have a few more ideas about, if not an actual answer (iyswim!?)I don't know whether it is nature or nurture, but I believe that something must have happened to make them "bad"

I agree with the posts above that calling them "evil" is an attempt to distance them from "you and I"

Because I think that's where people struggle and why so many people think evil = mhp / mhp = evil. Because they cannot believe, don't want to believe, daren't believe that a 'sane' person could do things which are evil

There is the yy chromosome thing - some men apparently have yy instead of xy - in the high security prison population eg murderers, rapists, pedophiles etc. this occurs more than in the general population. Another group where there is a higher proportion is high ranking police. Can't remember where I read it though.

I think some people are born with a predisposition towards 'evil'. That is if they had been born or experienced a different set of circumstances they may not have turned out the way they did. And some people wouldn't do evil things no matter what they had experienced. So I don't think everything can be entirely blamed on upbringing or entirely blamed on inbuilt characteristics.

I recently attended a talk, which included neuroscientific research which had been carried out in prisons. The research compared brain scans of psychopaths: people with severe antisocial personality disorder who were on the highest security wing for crimes such as murder, with non-psychopaths, who were convicted of less serious crimes e.g. theft.

It was found that the amygdala, which controls your emotions, was much smaller in psychopaths than in non-psychopaths. So perhaps people can be born evil, a result of an abnormality in the structure of the brain.